SpaceX fails in latest attempt to land rocket on ocean barge

After launch, the Falcon 9 booster re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and attempted a landing on the company’s seaborne droneship, called “Of Course I Still Love You”. If successful this will mark the fourth consecutive time SpaceX has successfully brought back its first stage rocket at sea.

Prior to that, several SpaceX rockets had crashed and exploded during landing attempts on barges.

SpaceX aims to launch and recover yet another rocket this morning, with the g0al of placing two new communications satellites into orbit high above the earth.

“Looks like thrust was low on 1 of 3 landing engines”.

The EUTELSAT 117 West B satellite will soon “strengthen the video capacities and offer key services to Latin America clients in the field of telecommunications and government services”. According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, one of these retrieved rockets could launch again as early as September. Previous spacecrafts launched by NASA and other companies historically relied on disposable booster rockets, which increased the cost of getting to outer space.

The landing platform of SpaceX is present almost 420 miles (680 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral for the first stage landing trial, which will likely happen roughly nine minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX failed to complete what would have been its fifth landing of a reusable booster rocket Wednesday.

Although the rocket may not have emerged from today’s launch, the satellites both did quite nicely.

Elon Musk ‘s private space company had previously managed to carry out three successful landings in a row.

The crash was so hard that the cameras on the drone ship stopped working, but Musk said there will be camera footage released late in the day.

In a live stream of the launch, SpaceX confirmed: “Unfortunately we lost the vehicle in [the] landing”. It launched two separate communication satellites, first one from Eutelsat and then one from ABS.

Wednesday’s launch was the second from the Cape in five days, following a Saturday flight by United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket.